"Just as disturbing as the errors themselves is the Times' apparent abandonment of standard journalistic practices in the course of its reporting on this story."

Hillary Clinton’s campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri has issued a scathing take on The New York Times’ erroneous report on Clinton that was published last Thursday.

The article initially stated that Clinton was the target of a criminal investigation because she used a private email server while serving as secretary of state. The piece relied on anonymous sources, who ended up being completely wrong. In a letter to Times executive editor Dean Baquet (and uh, the rest of the world), Palmieri took the gloves off:

I feel obliged to put into context just how egregious an error this story was. The New York Times is arguably the most important news outlet in the world and it rushed to put an erroneous story on the front page charging that a major candidate for President of the United States was the target of a criminal referral to federal law enforcement. Literally hundreds of outlets followed your story, creating a firestorm that had a deep impact that cannot be unwound. This problem was compounded by the fact that the Times took an inexplicable, let alone indefensible, delay in correcting the story and removing ‘criminal’ from the headline and text of the story.

To review the facts, as the Times itself has acknowledged through multiple corrections, the paper’s reporting was false in several key respects: first, contrary to what the Times stated, Mrs. Clinton is not the target of a criminal referral made by the State Department’s and Intelligence Community’s Inspectors General, and second, the referral in question was not of a criminal nature at all.